jemjabella

Review of 3till7.net

Reviewed: Sarah
Site URL: 3till7.net

The first thing I notice when I open my eyes at your site is the text “Welcome” at the top. That’s not a bad thing, it immediately told me it was good to be here – but I get the feeling the attention grabber really should be your beautiful side image. I think the reason why my eyes are drawn from the image is because of the colour (darkness) or size of the “Welcome” text, or maybe because it’s almost dead-center on my screen. Either way, there’s something not right about it. My suggestion would be to lighten the text a little, or give the image a bit more of a kick.

On the topic of your side image; I think it’s really great. I was quite shocked to discover that it is in fact a photograph, and not a coloured sketch. I’m not sure if it’s my laptop’s detail rendering, or whether it’s the actual photograph – but it just doesn’t look real. Don’t take this the wrong way, it doesn’t detract from the beauty of it at all. I compliment you on your photography skill.

I don’t understand the colour scheme. The blue-purple of your text table doesn’t flow with the image as well as I’d hoped it to, which is strange – because it’s the same colour as the photo background. I feel you could have integrated pink-purples into the layout more, to make the whole thing more ‘in tune’ with each component. I also feel you could have used a different shade of purple for your background – lighter, with a little more saturation maybe? At the moment it just doesn’t go.

Your navigation looks randomly placed, and doesn’t seem to fit where you’ve put it, although I can’t see any other alternative – it’s not a flexible layout in that sense. I agree with your choice of displaying the navigation, in a drop down menu, but I keep scrolling up to look for the ‘home’ button – I suggest placing that in your drop down menu too, just for ease-of-use. Loading is almost instantaneous, and everything is well positioned and proportioned.

I noticed on your FAQ you mention your bullet images, and you state “They do line up in Mozilla and Firefox.”. When I checked them in Firefox (and Netscape), they didn’t look complete, as if they’d frozen up while loading – is that supposed to happen? I feel they actually look better in IE, the way they’re subset from the content suits the overall page layout.

Your site is well written, although I’m not surprised, I expected nothing less than perfection from an A grade student. You make excellent use of the English language and although it may be confusing to some, it allows those who know what you’re talking about to nod in silent agreement. I am struggling to find an error in your spelling and grammar to attack you about; even your journal (where most people ‘relax’, myself included) exudes intelligence. Bravo!

I think you have enough content to qualify as catering for the visitor, it’s nothing special though. I had great fun reading through some of your random reads, but not everyone wants to read. I suggest looking for a few more PHP games, or creating something yourself – have you ever thought about learning to create games in Flash? You have the talent to do so. In MSIE, on your “101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot.” page, the numbers “100″ and “101″ are covered partly by the actual reason. I shouldn’t worry too much about it though; Mozilla Firefox, Netscape 7.1 and Opera 7.23 all display the page fine. Quite amusing, when you consider what the page is about.

Your personal content got quickly to the point, I was not left asking questions like I am on most so-called ‘personal’ sites because you included so much. I adored the fact your picture on your “About Noir: A Semi Auto-Biography” was not static; kudos to you for adding a little originality there. Your dreams journal is not common, and therefore I was immediately interested. You’ve put a lot of effort into such a simple concept, and it pays off.

I was interested to see that you carry a “Valid HTML 4.01″ button, yet that page doesn’t actually validate. I don’t have much experience with *strict* HTML, however, I assume that the can be fixed by placing “<p> </p>” tags around the piece of coding causing the problem. Check your validation results to see what this is (a name=”top”, etc).

After checking a few of your other pages, I realised that quite a few don’t validate. All because of the original error I noticed, with the exception of your index page. The HTML validator has picked up on a common mistake; you used an “&” in part of a link, instead of the entity “&amp;”. Here’s the piece of coding at fault:

<A href="?load=noir&me=contact" title="email, form, aliases">contact me</A>

Change the “&” for “&amp;”; your link will still work, and will validate too.

I am confused as to why you’re not using XHTML. It’s not a huge step from HTML, and while it is down to personal preference in the end, I think your site would be easy to convert. There are advantages to XHTML which you can find information about here. Even if you decide not to consider XHTML, I’d suggest coding your site in lower case. Just a personal preference of my own, I guess.

Overall, your site was a pleasure to browse. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about you, browsing your photography and generally having fun with your “Visitor” section – Random in particular. It is obvious that you’ve put a lot of hard work into your site to make it yours. You should work on the few points I brought up, and seriously consider XHTML. Best of luck in the future for you.

Review of scrubalicious.net

Reviewed: Linze
Site URL: scrubalicious.net

“Aaah”. Immediately I am relaxed. Strange really, most people wouldn’t consider a website “relaxing” as such, but there is something that appeals to me here. I’m not a dog lover, but it is refreshing to see a great photo implemented into a layout with a corresponding colour scheme, and see it implemented well. Personal opinions aside, had I been ‘just passing’ I think I would have settled down with a coffee to get a better look at things, because you’ve grabbed my attention. Your site is soft and subtle but definately “there”, it’s alive. My first impression is good one.

Your font colours stand out away from the background and you’ve used a sans-serif font at a decent size; I commend you for that. It’s all too easy to slip into tiny text mode, but I don’t think your site would suit anything other than 8pt. I am glad you’ve added padding to your content so it’s not rushing against the “wall” of the boxes containing your content/etc, it makes it so much easier to read! Also, strangely enough I appreciate the letter spacing despite the fact that I usually cannot stand it. Your presentation is consistant – there are no sudden glares of colour or outlandish link rollover effects that tend to make me cringe. It is well organised and your titles and subtitles stand out.

Your navigation is incredibly functional – I am glad I didn’t have to glare at a 700×500 pixel image trying to figure out which tiny star is featuring the link to the next scrap of content. It’s easy to spot there on the left hand side, and stands out because of your intelligent colouring of the links (I am so glad they’re not the same colour as your text). You’ve titled all of your links too, which means when I don’t know what you’re trying to suggest – I can just hover right over and get a clearer description which suggests to me you’ve really thought about your visitors. I had no problem finding the link to CSR and no problem browsing your site, excellent!

It’s nice to see that every image on your site is set out the same way. All set the same size as other images on the same page with a white and black border – it is consistancy like this that make your site a pleasure to look at, and a pleasure to return to.

I think the first and most important thing I can say regarding your content is “wow”. I get the impression that you want to include the visitor in their “journey” around your site, yet at the same time you are keeping things mostly personal. For example; the Pit Bull information – it was a pleasent surprise to go to your site and learn something from your “learn” section, instead of just getting misinformed on how to add sloppy grids to a badly photoshopped Britney Spears. Bravo! You take your knowledge and information on your chosen topic and you put it across suitably. You suggest pros and cons to owning a Pit Bull, and you actually care to get your facts right! I am impressed (this is not an easy task). It was nice to be warned about the content under “Pit Bull” abuse, it shows consideration for younger visitors and sensitive eyes.

I liked reading through your “About Me” page. It wasn’t the usual jumble of long words that site owners tend to stick together to try and sound impressive, it was down to earth – an insight into you, which I am assuming is what you were aiming for. I get the same impression on your “Eli and Me” page – while it’s there for the visitors to read, it’s very much you. I enjoyed reading about you; I even enjoyed reading your filler pages (pages like ‘My ABCs’ and ‘Random Facts’ which everyone seems to have). Your button collection and thrift find pages are unique (as far as I know; I’ve never seen any other site with them) – I especially liked the red button with the woman kicking the man, this appealed to my sense of humour, heh.

The “Story Time” page made me giggle, I cannot wait to see this story in a few weeks – hopefully when more people have added their input. I simply don’t have the time to comment on all of your content, as there is far too much – but I AM going to say that is certainly will be a pleasure returning in my spare time to check out more of your stuff. I am constantly surprised, impressed and amused by little bits of writing, content, etc – it is nice to see a site where the owner (you) tries to keep it unique, but at the same time doesn’t brag about it or add comments which would suggest that popularity/visitors are all that is important. It is nice to get a real feel for you even on pages where that would not necessarily be applicable. I can’t say enough how nice a feeling that is!

Your coding is near perfect, but unfortunately despite the fact you claim to have valid XHTML it isn’t validating. This is only because you’ve forgotten (I assume) to close the img tags on your Model Horses and Mustang Fanlisting images. When I converted to XHTML, I used to forget the same thing. Just a reminder, it should be:
<img src="fls/models.gif" border="0" height="20" width="150" alt="The Model Horse Fanlisting" title="The Model Horse Fanlisting" />

You’re also linking to the incorrect stylesheet under “Welcome” – it is trying to validate “http://scrubalicious.net/v13c/index.css” which obviously doesn’t exist anymore, instead of http://scrubalicious.net/index.css – your actual stylesheet.

Other than these ’silly’ errors, I can see no fault with your coding, or your site in fact.

In summary, your site is pleasent to browse, easy on the eyes, interesting and unique. I get the feeling of connecting with you, enhanced by the constant interaction and the ability to submit opinions, comments, suggestions, entries to your activities – it gives me the feeling of being within your reach constantly. My only problem is that you didn’t make enough mistakes for me to give you a proper critique, it seems to be mostly ego-inflating compliments. Damn you! On a more serious note.. keep up the great work, because I will be back.

Review of bubblessoc.net

Reviewed: Bubs
Site URL: bubblessoc.net

Note: I am reviewing skin 7, “My Doodleblog”.

The first thing I see upon getting to your site is the doodle, smack-bang in the middle. Not such a bad thing, as it’s a cute doodle – but I think it dominates the screen. The layout is lovely, and the colours simply drift into each other, I don’t think the doodle should be allowed to detract from that. My suggestion is to decrease the size of the doodle, or link a thumbnail version of to a pop-up or the archives so we can see the full version *if* we want to.

The layout works. I don’t can’t think of a better way to put that sentence. The layout just works. Despite using a variety of colours, the pale pastel shades fit well together and give the page a unique and relaxing look. You text is appropriately sized, and I’m glad you used verdana – it seems to “fit” with pastel shade layouts, because of its chunkiness. The fact that you’ve used different sizes in the sidebar, and different link effects is ‘cute’ – it makes the page more appealing, and less ’static’ – change is good.

The page loaded at a reasonable speed, and although you’ve got a few images here and there, I think they complement the layout – especially the day headings for the weblog entries. Certainly something I’d not seen before. I am glad you’ve got your own set of smilies – especially designed to fit the line height too, great stuff!

I don’t like your navigation. When the skin first loaded I assumed the navigation would be on the left-hand side with all of the other menu content, and it wasn’t. My brain did not register that the yellow-green row was anything other than a divider, to split the doodle from the rest of the content. Also, the link initial is confusing – I don’t like having to hover to find out where I’m going. I think this really lets the rest of the layout down.

Once I got used to the navigation, I found your content. You have some great content, and I love the way you’ve set things out – the little pink bullet is *too* cute. However, I am curious as to why you’ve indented the start of your paragraphs in your Autobiography, yet in Love there is no indentation. On the rest of your pages you’ve indented the whole paragraph or nothing at all. I think you should stick to indenting the first line of each paragraph on the pages with large amounts of text, because it looks better. It adds to the consistancy and overall perfection of the layout too.

Talking of layouts, I want to know why you’ve not used “Image 9″ from artwork in a layout (skin)?! It’s one of the cutest images I’ve seen on your site, and would work so well with pastel pinks and something chunky – big fonts, etc. This is merely a suggestion, of course.

On your ‘Random Facts’ page, you’ve spelt cigarette wrong. It is cigarette, not “cigarrette”. On your “Love” page you have typed “we” twice – “was the night before we we left for college”. On “Reading Material” under “The Perfect Guy”, you use chat speak, which makes you appear less intelligent than you really are – you’ve also misspelled appreciate – “or even if they r bad u appreaciate the effort to make u laugh”. On the same page under “Insanity” you’ve missed the hyphen from co-workers (“your coworkers address you by your wrestling name”). Also on the same page, under “Feel Better”, the comma after ‘world’ in the first sentence is not needed, nor is the comma after ‘you’ in the fifth sentence. You’ve combined every night to “Everynight” – add the space. On the 14th line, replace the comma after them with a semi-colon to be grammatically correct.

You’ve got a good amount of content – it is obvious to me that you like/respect your visitors. I think it’s quite generous of you to offer your groovy smilies, and those adorable webpage goodies. Your list of downloadable fonts is nice – do you have permission from the creators to redistribute them? On that topic, have you ever thought of making your own font? You have lovely handwriting! Check out Fontifier.com. I love your Radio Blog – I’ve never seen that on a website before.

Looking at your coding I felt quite ashamed. I don’t have any right to be reviewing you – you are really quite talented! You’ve mastered XHTML, CSS (and tableless CSS), PHP, and more. I checked your validation results on as many pages as my poor little hands would allow, and I can’t find *any* errors – round of applause to you. I tried to find errors, and was left speechless – you’ve done a fabulous job.

With the exception of a few spelling/grammar errors your site was a pleasure to read through, colourful yet pleasing to the eyes and very well coded. Try and do something with your navigation though – it is really quite frustrating. Overall, I loved your site, and adored the fact I didn’t have to critique your coding. Well done.

In The Paper

Because of strikes at the place Karl works at, I wrote in a letter (supposedly for the letters page) on Monday telling the strikers that I think they’re being selfish, and not putting the children first — which is what teaching is about. Anyway, i’ve been looking out ever since Monday, waiting for my letter to appear.. and Karl just rang me telling me it was printed, but not on the letters page.

I made the front page. :o

See the article

Happy 2004!

Happy New Year! (In 2 minutes 50 seconds…)

Cross-posted from Livejournal